


Multitudinous Seas

by standalone



Series: Fucking Political Bullshit exR Coffeeshop AU [4]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: (apparently bjs are important to this series, (bc specificity), Alley Blow Jobs, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Politics, Alternate Universe - Race Changes, Atheism, Blow Jobs, Despair, Hope, M/M, so I guess they deserve a tag)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-27
Updated: 2017-02-27
Packaged: 2018-09-27 05:58:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9979466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/standalone/pseuds/standalone
Summary: “The gains we make will be incremental. Do not despair. Do not feel overwhelmed and throw up your hands. Progress takes time.” —U.S. Senator Kamala Harris (D-California), Feb. 26, 2017In which we all attempt to persevere.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [werebear](http://archiveofourown.org/users/werebear/profile) for some truly vital reads and advice, particularly in regard to taming an unconscionable overgrowth of metaphors. The work's continuing excesses are, of course, my own damn fault.

**Multitudinous Seas**

Enjolras is not cut out for this. He feels gangly, all elbows, arms mysteriously incapable of his fellow gym visitors’ rat-a-tat rapid-fire combinations that keep the heavy bags swaying around him. 

He's not good at it. That's okay. It's helping him live with this life.

"Jab, jab, hook!" bellows the instructor. "Hook! I said _hook_ , not _hooks_ , Amira, don't let your guard down, you're getting punched in the face right now!"

The woman next to Enjolras is obviously at minimal risk of getting punched in the face by the bag she's pummeling, but she gamely raises her orange-gloved fists and hops back for a second, reassesses, before lunging in for more. 

God, he is so fucking done with it all. He punches at the bag and thinks about the awful people floating blithely upward in influence, fatuous sacks of shit who are on the one hand just tickled to be here, on the other totally incompetent, incompetent, incompetent, and on the third, avaricious and shortsighted and just as fucking mean as middle-American tight-lipped, suited good-old-boy exemptions will excuse. He punches harder, and far away there’s booming boxing-gym music, but all Enjolras hears is the rushing energy of his own body as he strikes out against the acquiescent vinyl. His fists land in a flurry of thumps, none of them as resounding as he’d like, but the least of them better than the alternative: stewing in front of the computer at home, punching viciously at the blameless keyboard.

The punching-bag’s blameless too, but at least it can handle a beating. 

“That’s the way!” the instructor says, patting him on the shoulder. “Switch!”

This means everyone on the bags needs to take their turn doing burpees on the mat while the other half of the students go at the bags.

Hopping aside, Enjolras tries to push the loose hair out of his eyes, but the gloves make it impossible. He contemplates tugging the gloves off, but the woman in orange gloves is already a few reps deep in the burpees; a few loose curls, he decides, he can live with. Enjolras finds space beside her, takes a deep breath, and drops into a squat.

You'd think Grantaire's gym, in a dilapidated old warehouse, would be airy and cool, but the pent-up heat pumping from the masses of weekenders fills the space.

A few minutes later, Enjolras switches back in on the bag, then out, and in, and out, working on new combinations that struggle to make their way to his muscles even though his brain ostensibly knows what it’s supposed to do. The patterns become especially tricky once they get to the partnered part of the lesson. He definitely takes a couple in the sternum when he ducks right instead of left.

“Watch for the openings!” the instructor reminds him sternly, but Enjolras is too caught up in trying to remember the scripted punches and dodges to improvise. 

Enjolras glances over from his cool-down when he hears the bell chime in the ring at the far end of the gym, away from the practice space. It’s almost Pavlovian by this point: this is when he stows the jump-rope and goes over to stretch and watch Grantaire spar in the ring.

But, for the first time since he dragged Enjolras to the gym with him, Grantaire’s not here today. 

It’s not like either of them have really had spare time for anything that’s not directly contributive to the scramble to tie a splintering world back together. But still, a few hours for boxing, they’ve so far managed to squeeze in.

Since today’s Saturday, Grantaire probably went straight from his morning shift at the cafe to the immigration law clinic where he’s been volunteering his services as an translator. 

The first day he’d done it, he came home with a hard glint in his eyes, went straight for the fridge, and downed a few beers in quick succession before he’d tell Enjolras a thing. When pressed, he growled, “I speak Arabic like a fucking third-grader.” 

Enjolras didn't really buy this; he's heard snippets of Grantaire's intense and lengthy phone calls home. But he gets that he's no expert. Enjolras speaks French like a three-year-old, and Spanish like he got off the plane in Havana three hours ago. Grantaire, uncorking a bottle of wine, elaborated: “I’m tryna say, ‘This ban is temporary, Mr. Al-ani; the courts are still investigating what it will mean for your parents’ green-card status,’ but it comes out like, ‘It is not forever, we think, I don’t know, the courts don’t know, nobody fucking knows.’” He took a swig from the bottle. “Which is not even a little bit reassuring.” The subtext in Grantaire’s raw voice is obvious: he feels useless.

This makes sense. When the oceans surge, one wishes to be a sea-wall, a protector, an insurmountable barricade. But every wall gets breached sometimes.

The next morning, after walking a closed-off and hung-over Grantaire to work, Enjolras went to the print center down the street and had them print and bind a manual he found online for English-Arabic legal translation. 

Grantaire devoured the thing with a kind of focus Enjolras maybe didn’t know he had, and it seems to have helped. Now Grantaire’s both translating at the immigration law clinic and via video chats from Enjolras’s apartment (since the internet he steals from his neighbor at his own place is abysmal), and he seems more confident, more driven than Enjolras has ever seen him. 

Except today, Enjolras jogs back to his apartment, and Grantaire’s just _there_ , flopped out on his sofa, fast asleep with his phone on his chest and a couple empty beer cans next to him.

Enjolras moves the cans to the recycling, pulls on a fresh hoodie in lieu of his sweaty t-shirt, and settles with his laptop at the other end of the couch. He owes the senator the first draft of yet another scathing diatribe; she’s been demanding fewer conciliatory revisions than usual, allowing her speeches to cut to the bone, because maybe that's what it's going to take.

Resistant to efforts to wake him up until well after dinner time, Grantaire accedes to Enjolras’s demands that they eat something, so they bundle up and trudge down the street to Grantaire’s favorite phở place.

Grantaire is unsettlingly quiet. He orders beers, plural, along with his soup, and then just sags into them, slurping and guzzling and staring vacantly out the window at the nighttime street.

“You weren’t at the gym,” Enjolras says, tearing herbs into his bowl with his fingertips and trying to sound unconcerned.

“Nah.”

“I was hoping I’d get to see you. You know, in the ring.” This is an understatement; Grantaire in the ring sets Enjolras’s loins alight; each time, he feels the adrenaline surge of the moment with the bikers in the alley, of Grantaire shoving him out of the way, of Grantaire’s willingness to be first to face the mob. It stirs in Enjolras a thick muddle of feelings that must be more serious than they ought to be.

And damn, the fucking that ensues.

“Yeah?” Grantaire looks up at him for a split second, from under those heavy brows, and Enjolras almost sees a sparkle there before the face shuts back down. “Fuck that, man. Nothing fucking helps.”

* * * 

The office is strewn with postcards and strung-together paper snowflakes. #PERSIST, they say. #INSIST. #RESIST.

But Lamarque, at the bedside of her dying father, is not here to fight today.

Enjolras drafts a brief statement thanking her supporters for their love and her colleagues for their forbearance. He gets her approval by phone and sends the message to Congress and the press. How fucked-up, he thinks, to have to broadcast your sorrow because hundreds of millions of Americans are counting on your physical presence in a stupid gilded room because people like you are their only goddamn hope. 

The calls pour in—mixed in with the now-usual deluge demanding opposition votes to the slew of dangerous cabinet appointees, there are sympathy and condolences and long stories of other people’s losses, and the office is a teary place. Enjolras is almost glad of the break in the sadness that comes when a racist asshole calls to tell him this is why women don't belong in politics, if Lamarque were a white man, she’d be in the Senate chamber right this minute instead of boohooing about her daddy, and Enjolras doesn’t even pretend to have professional courtesy.

“You fucking piece of shit,” he says. “Write this shit down so your descendants remember why they spit on your grave.” And he hangs up. 

The guy probably calls back, but Celia makes Enjolras take a break from phones.

* * * 

“Well, that’s good news,” Jehan chirps, looking up from his phone screen that evening at the Musain. Musichetta’s opened the place to their fledgling resistance group; they’re still figuring out what they’ll do, what they can contribute that’s different from what everyone else is doing. There are so many disparate groups fighting back—through direct action, organizing, investigation, hacking, political activism. Even rogue Twitter. But who’s coordinating? What’s going to bring them all together?

“What’s good news?” Enjolras will take literally anything right now.

“The [North Dakota bill](http://bismarcktribune.com/news/state-and-regional/driver-liability-bill-defeated-in-north-dakota-house/article_c796afd7-a884-5a01-91ca-f36ded10c99a.html)? That would allow you to hit protesters with your car? Has failed!”

He takes it back. Not literally anything. He cannot applaud the halting of one tiny hillside in this nationwide avalanche. Bahorel and Eponine have been at Standing Rock since the inauguration, calling in to the Musain meetings with increasingly dire updates. No one can imagine that the protest camp will withstand much more assault; still, in the face of almost-certain defeat, they do not back down.

“The republic!” cheers Grantaire bitterly, lifting his glass. “Long may it decline into dictatorial obscurity!”

Combeferre pivots from down the bar, where he and Joly are hunched over Musichetta’s phone.

“We will check this decline,” he says quietly. “The holes are opening. People are falling away. Our time is close. We won’t get everything, but this will _not_ become a dictatorship, Grantaire. We won’t let it.”

“How foolish of me. I must have forgotten that dictators always ask permission first.”

“The fundamental frameworks of our democracy are intact,” Enjolras interjects. “That, alone, should prevent our panicking. This egregious disregard for the people cannot sustain itself.”

“You’re talking checks and balances, yeah?”

“Well, yes.”

“When the rule of law becomes meaningless, what’s fucking left?”

“The rule of _law_?” Musichetta chimes in. “You and I both know damn well this nation’s never been ruled by law.”

“Not on the streets,” Grantaire accedes, boozily recalibrating. “Hell, maybe _law_ ’s not the word. I mean, doesn’t it seem like a massive fucking oversight that the founders didn’t plan for people trying to destroy this shit from the inside? Like, here comes a metaphor, science nerds: Washington’s full of domes. They’re architectural masterworks. They’ll take what you throw at them? They don’t knock over. But a dome’s the easiest damn thing to ruin. All it takes is someone who’s safe and warm inside and decides to say, _fuck a roof_ , and push _up_.”

The words churn in Enjolras. Not because he’s sure they’re true, but because he can’t swear they’re not. His whole life is about fighting back, but once the enemy’s inside, pushing out at its flimsy bonds like the awful clown in a papier-mâché birthday cake, how the hell do you hold it back?

“Fuck a roof!” cheers Courfeyrac, having just charged in from the kitchen with a platter of snacks in time to hear this latest. “It’s lit!”

“The roof ain’t going nowhere,” says Musichetta, sliding Courf a pint.

Courf shrugs and raises his glass. “Still lit,” he says.

Grantaire tries to go to his own place that night, but he’s so slurring and unsteady that Enjolras won’t let him. As a reward for keeping him safe, Enjolras gets to wake up half a dozen times in the night to tiptoe out to the couch (Grantaire refuses the bed) and make sure Grantaire’s still snoring and okay. When Enjolras wakes yet again in the first light of morning, Grantaire’s long gone.

* * * 

“Because he knows it’s the only thing that can destroy him,” Lamarque says, her voice rough, almost a whisper. “He knows we need it. That’s why he wants to poison it, before the fact-checkers can confirm everything it’ll take to bring him down.”

She’s stepped outside her childhood home; Enjolras hears a profusion of birds twittering around her, a cheery counterpoint that highlights the senator’s hushed tone. He scrawls something on the notepad in front of him, crosses out a word, rearranges. 

“How about this? _The free press endangers only liars, manipulators, and tyrants_.”

“Enjolras,” she sighs. “You take what I want to say and give me the words to say it.” 

“So I should tweet it?”

“Yes, with all the hashtags and what have you.” He can imagine that even now, in her sorrow, she’s doing that little hand-flappy thing she does whenever she wants to pretend she doesn’t get kids and their media.

There’s a long, quiet moment where Enjolras types it into Twitter, appends #NotTheEnemy and #TruthtoPower, and clicks Tweet.

“Senator,” he says, because he heard an unasked question in what she said, about him and words. “What else can I do for you?”

She pauses. Breathes. Pauses. A mockingbird trills.

“Let me tell you about my father,” she says.

* * * 

Grantaire had goddamned _better_ be at the Musain this evening. Enjolras got two calls at work from the law clinic—the caller very politely explained that Grantaire’s not there, and of course it’s a voluntary position, but he signed up for this shift, and as Enjolras is the backup contact number he provided, does Enjolras have any idea where he might be?

Enjolras’s calls to Grantaire go to voicemail, and his texts receive no answer. No one picks up the landline at Enjolras’s apartment, nor is Grantaire online, and his boss says he left his job as usual hours ago, and Enjolras is stressed and steamed and scared.

Where the fuck is he?

He texts Courf and ‘Ferre to ask them to keep their eyes out; he won’t be able to leave work for at least another hour, not till he gets a chance to talk to the senator again, so they’ll probably beat him to the Musain.

Courf texts back right away.

 **Courfeyrac:** Bro, he’s right here

 **Enjolras:** At Musain????

 **Courfeyrac:** Chill, man

 **Courfeyrac:** Yeah

 **Courfeyrac:** We just shotgunned tallboys

 **Courfeyrac:** R’s in top form

Well, fuck.

 **Enjolras:** Just keep him there, k?

 **Courfeyrac:** No worries

*

By the time Enjolras makes it, sweaty and anxious, to the Musain, it’s almost 9, and Grantaire, poetically sauced, is sitting on the bar holding court.

“At which mighty failing do we say, _Enough_? When will we know we have given our all? Some say we’ll know because it’s when our death-blood pours from our veins; others say, hell, it’s just fucking now.” He salutes the crowd, and continues. “To _await_ salvation and to _seek_ salvation seem, on the face, to be different sorts of endeavor. It seems like lazy people wait, and bold people seek. But I’m here to tell you they’re the same damn thing. They’re both people looking for an out. But there’s no outs. We’re here and shit is gonna be shitty. Maybe someone’ll save us. Maybe you’ll save yourself. But it seems improbable, doesn’t it?” He grabs the beer that’s sitting next to him and chugs deeply from it. “Damn right. It seems improba-fucking-possible. No one’s gonna save us.”

Grantaire is beautifully, irritatingly disheveled, hair particularly shapeless—and demanding, in his self-effacing drunkenness, absolute attention.

Enjolras is incensed. 

Grantaire sees him first. His eyes constrict—perhaps from the bright light of the entry, which shines briefly in until the door swings shut again. “Heyyy! Enjolras! Come to rescue me?”

“Get down, Grantaire.”

“He orders me down,” Grantaire observes, “like it’s an easy thing, to climb down, like I got up here by choice, like I’m not a helpless cat trapped up a tree awaiting my savior. Because yes—surprise!— _I’m_ the lazy person who waits. And look! My savior has come, and he’s gonna get me down and—”

“Get off the bar.” Enjolras’s arms are folded across his chest. He knows he looks angry. He is too angry to care.

“Oh. Oh _no_. Oh, friends and family, lovers and lawyers, I must confess, much as it pains me to do so: I was right. There is to be no salvation today. Shackled to this bar-top, Grantaire shall remain, a lonely fool made more fool still by human weakness. Here, Grantaire’s battle ends. Here, it shall be said—” He pulls from his pocket a handful of change and plunks it beside him on the bar. “No, it shall be _inscribed_ , for from barstools to immortality or however the saying goes, ‘Here rests hope, which is dead. Also, Grantaire.’ No, ‘Also, R.’ Yes, just the R, doesn’t that sound pointed? ‘Also: R’?”

Using the crossbar of Courfeyrac’s stool as a step, Enjolras joins Grantaire on the bar. 

Musichetta slides him a whiskey. He debates for about half a second, then tosses it back.

Handing the empty glass behind him to Musichetta, he addresses the bar. No use pretending everyone’s not watching them anyway. 

“I have some things to say about hope.”

“May it rest in piece.”

He ignores this. “We’ve gotten a nice long chunk of time where hope had power. As a word. It sounded radical for maybe the first time in our lives, not wishy-washy and vague like hope usually sounds. It was hope with an agenda and a platform. And what I have to say is, hope like that, hope backed up by action, it’s not going anywhere. We’re not going to work and to protests and here, to this, because we’re _hopeless_. Doing anything at all is a sign of some faint belief that this is worth surviving. And if that’s not hope, I don’t know what is.

“Today I drafted a fucking _eulogy_ for a man who spent his entire goddamned life fighting, who insisted in his final hours that they schedule his funeral around his daughter’s senatorial obligations. ‘Just stow me in the freezer till next week,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep.’

“He died believing in the struggle. That’s hope. And hope sustains itself on belief. Not like fairies. But like banks, like social security, like Dr. King’s promissory note. There has to be a tomorrow to fund today.”

“What about when tomorrow’s bankrupt?” Grantaire queries. “Winter’s coming. Democracy dies in darkness. Few return to the sunlit lands. If we’re fucked tomorrow, we’re fucked today.”

“No. We’re already fucked today.” Fucked a thousand different ways. He could enumerate them. He does, in his head, when he’s trying to sleep. Grantaire knows this as well as anyone; he’s the guy who’s always telling Enjolras to just let it go for a little, have a hit of this, let’s make out; give yourself a couple hours where the world doesn’t get to tear you apart. “I’m not saying we’re not fucked. I’m saying, it’s gonna get less fucked. Not in all the ways. Shit is so bad. But shit’s been so much worse. I’m not even talking about all of tens of thousands of years of human history, I’m just talking about here, this country, _our_ country. Shit’s been unthinkably worse. And the only reason anything’s ever gotten better is that people hoped. They hoped, and they made fucking plans, and they risked literally everything, and they _trusted_ in hope.”

“Damn straight,” Courf concurs, handing him another shot and clinking glasses. There’s a chorus of other voices that chimes in in agreement, the rush of support he’s come to expect whenever he gets speechy these days. Working for the senator has mellowed his delivery; he’s learned to mask the raw anger that used to fuel his words, to disguise orders as exhortations. In his soapboxing days, he used to play to baser instincts—to listeners’ own fears and hatreds. Lamarque makes him appeal to their better selves. 

It’s become second nature now. Enjolras doesn’t think about it; he’s also not sure, though, whether it’s really him. Times like these—don’t they demand vitriol? But at the Musain, and in the Senator’s mouth, his words uplift. They unite. They rouse people to action. And maybe those actions will mean something. 

Beside him, Grantaire nods sagely, as if he agrees, and then he gives Enjolras a crooked half-smile—a smile that reminds Enjolras of their first real conversation, months ago, and how then, too, neither could quite smile, and that’s what brought them to whatever this thing is they have, and perhaps that’s going to forever be the truth of their relationship, that it will always be about trying to find an entire slice of unblemished happiness. That half-way smile’s a tell. It’s not trying to find happiness. It’s trying _not to._

When he sees it, Enjolras knows, just knows, that whatever he’s about to say is going to hit him in the guts and fester. 

“Sure,” Grantaire says, having helped himself to a new bottle of beer from the tub behind the bar. “If we believe in the fight, we’re all saved.” He looks at Enjolras earnestly, almost like he believes it, almost like the pithy words aren’t meant as a scathing indictment of the self-righteousness of resistance. “Isn’t that right, Che?”

That simulacrum of seriousness is what actually gets him. It’s too cutting. It’s not just Grantaire being obnoxious; it’s Grantaire pushing him away.

Enjolras pushes off from the bar and pulls Grantaire after him. 

“Why, Enj—” Grantaire begins in a syrupy voice that is clearly headed toward an over-the-top, knight-in-shining-armor appreciation.

“Outside,” Enjolras says. “Now.”

Pushing through their assorted friends and comrades, Enjolras drags Grantaire by the sleeve into the alley behind the bar. 

“What the fuck?” he says to Grantaire once they’re outside. Now that he’s looking at him head-on, it is obvious that Grantaire is very drunk. 

This isn’t who Grantaire gets to be. Grantaire saved him. Grantaire’s the guy who insisted that Enjolras had to feel things, that he couldn’t let himself sink in the awfulness. But more and more, Grantaire’s been avoiding and hiding and escaping, dodging behind snide words and full bottles. 

He asks it again: “What the _fuck_ is going on with you.”

It comes out slowly. Grantaire seems to consider a clever retort, but it twists in his mouth; he _is_ very drunk, and he is, Enjolras can now see, angry. Enjolras is angry too, the fury aimless and hot, sparking from his skin in the cold night air, threatening to strike Grantaire and explode. Neither of them are crying but really, Enjolras is pretty sure, this would be a lot easier if they were.

Grantaire glares, and then the piercing eyes drop, his whole body drooping, as if on strings. “They keep thanking me,” he says. “At the lawyers’.”

“So?”

“They thank me, and they thank the lawyers, and they thank God.” Grantaire’s still holding that last beer he lifted from the bar. He raises it toward his face, but Enjolras grabs his wrist. Grantaire’s eyebrows pull together. “They thank fucking _God_ for me, for people who don’t hate them. This is how fucking bad it is, Enj, that people thank God for other people not wanting them deported. Or dead. And guess fucking what? They’re _getting_ deported. A bunch of them are getting deported, and a bunch of them are gonna end up dead.”

He slams his empty fist down into the wall behind him, hard and sudden enough to shock Enjolras. Not enough for him to let go of the other, but enough for his heart to hiccup at the brutality of this assault Grantaire has just committed upon himself. Grantaire contemplates the hand. There’s blood. 

“I’m fucking useless,” he mutters to his damaged fingers, so quietly that it’s almost a whisper. “But you know who’s more fucking useless?” He swings his fist down again, into the bricks, to punctuate his point: “Fucking God. Damn it all. Damn God. Damn religion. I know it’s not fucking a _bout_ that, but it’s a hell of an excuse, isn’t it, to hate people? To spy on them and trap them and sentence them to death for bullshit politics, and to sell it to the idiot masses as a god thing?”

He hasn't pushed Grantaire to talk about this before. Maybe if they were more similar in this regard, he would have, but Enjolras finds religion an oddity. Born into a family of atheists, Enjolras’s sentiments in regard to faith tend to be fairly neutral: he supports the right of people to believe, of course, especially when it leads them to treat their fellow humans better; he opposes it when used as a tool for discrimination. This all feels so blatantly obvious, that he's figured there's really not much to say. 

Grantaire hasn't seemed eager to talk about it anyway.

“I used to believe it,” he says, so reluctantly that Enjolras is suddenly aware this is going way deeper than he thought. He asked for a peek in the window, but it looks like he’s getting a tour of the cobwebbed basement. “I used to pray for everything—bad shit, good shit. I remember when my folks finally got their citizenship, first thing we did was drive to the mosque, and I gave _praise_ , not to them, who’d done all the work to move to the other side of the world, not to the immigration lawyers who helped them or the policymakers, no, I gave thanks to the fucking _divine_. The unseeable, the unknowable.”

Enjolras dreads where this is going. Grantaire talks so little about his family. He knows there are many of them—sisters and brothers, most born here, but the oldest ones born in Yemen before their parents, wary of the country’s tenuous stability, decided to emigrate. Grantaire hasn’t told him what it cost them. He hasn’t said if there were deaths. 

He remembers, with painful poignancy, Grantaire yelling at him that the cost of living is loss. What are the losses that cost Grantaire his belief? 

Grantaire sneers at Enjolras.

“Fuck you,” he says, wrenching his bottle-hand loose from Enjolras’s grip and taking a swig. “You’re thinking something awful happened. To make me lose faith. But it wasn’t awful for anyone but me. I was just starting to see, like, with God around, no one gets their fucking _due_. My mom and dad worked until their fingers bled, and they gave the glory to God. We went to shit schools and we got made fun of and we paid our fucking taxes, and we praised God. 

“It was like, my whole damn life I’d been struggling, all of us, just trying to keep our family going, and everyone kept saying, _this is just how it is, son, how it goes, everyone has to fight to stay up, keep praying it gets better_ , and then eventually, it did. And the minute I got to where shit wasn’t so hard, I looked out at all these people hustling for every little basic thing, and I couldn’t begin to understand how that ever seemed normal. How it seemed _right_. Like, there are people fucking scraping life together all around me, giving thanks they can pay rent this month even though maybe that means no dinner all week. I didn’t get out by being better, or holier, or praying harder, or fucking _hoping_. I got out by dumb luck. I got jobs. I graduated. Shit got easier, work paid better. And there are people failing who are doing more to live than I ever did, and if that was God’s fucking _will_?” His voice raises in pitch, breaking.

“We call it ‘struggle,’ because, _hope_.” The bitterness drips from the word. “Because ‘suffering’ implies hopelessness. And hopelessness” —he slams his hand into the wall a second time as he spits the sounds out— “is wrong.”

“I was so fucking tired” —and again, the hand smashes against the bricks; even in the dim light, it’s obviously pulped, torn and swollen—“of watching people pray to a god who, if he’s there, clearly doesn’t give half a shit about _any_ of us.”

Grantaire doesn't look, right now, like his life’s any kind of easy. He looks like a man drowning—not in the physical demands of survival, but in the flood of hopelessness. 

Enjolras knows because he been there. He's felt the salt water fill his mouth, the surging eddies below drag him down. Hell, he's still there, _still_ struggling to the surface. Still drawing breath. And it's not because of God. It's because of people: people like Lamarque, and Musichetta, and Combeferre. And yet, in those first awful, bleak moments, it wasn't them who kept him fighting. He didn't trust himself to call for them, when the first waves washed him out to sea. (We all know how it happens—how the drowning entwine themselves around their heroic, strong-lunged friends, how easily one death turns to two.) He couldn't risk it.

A stranger dragged him up for air. As much as anything, he's still in it because of Grantaire. 

Grantaire, who is saying, “That’s when I stopped caring. When I stopped fighting.” Grantaire, who is right this moment lifting his bottle to drain the dregs.

This time, Enjolras snatches the bottle directly. He tosses it down the alley where it lands in a heap of trash bags.

Grantaire doesn’t think he cares. Grantaire doesn’t think he fights. But Grantaire’s fought for him. Every damn time, Grantaire’s fought against him, beside him, with him—whatever it’s taken to keep him going.

“Square up,” Enjolras says. 

Looking from the discarded bottle to Enjolras, Grantaire doesn’t even do Enjolras the kindness of looking confused. He just looks mad.

“I said, square up,” Enjolras says. He’s doing his level best to assume the position his instructor’s always reminding him about. 

Grantaire glares. “You think this is fucking funny?”

“Not at all,” Enjolras says, and directs a hard jab at his shoulder. It’s the first time since the Inauguration that he’s thrown a punch without gloves. It lands on bone; he feels the crunch in his knuckles and his gut. Oh god. What if he hurt him?

The curl of Grantaire’s lip is the only indication he even felt it.

Enjolras crosses, then hits him with a few more jabs. Grantaire takes the punches stoically, letting his body sink backward into the wall with each punch, absorbing the impact. Desperate to get a reaction, Enjolras chances one—not too hard, he hopes, but this _is_ a desperate time, and he is desperate—at the jaw.

“Stop fucking hitting me,” Grantaire says this time, tilting his head away and grimacing. “I’m not kidding, Enjolras, I’m gonna—”

Enjolras gets him right over his heart, and then, shit, _finally_ , Grantaire’s hitting back. 

He knows Grantaire’s pulling his punches, because he’s seen him in the ring, he’s seen the lightning-strikes of those fists, and that is not this—well, yes, it hurts like fuck, but he’s still standing, isn’t he? Standing and letting the blows rain over him, his ribs and arms and—damn it, not the chin; that one makes him stumble back—shoulders, and even scoping out openings, managing to land at least one feeble fist in one of the split seconds where Grantaire’s vulnerable.

If he wanted to, Grantaire could fell Enjolras with one blow.

Grantaire pulls back. The two stand feet apart, fists raised, panting and sweaty in the cold night.

“Fuck,” he says. His eyes are alive and angry, and this is _so much_ better than glassy and hopeless. “Fuck, Enj, I _told_ you not to fucking—”

Enjolras pushes him back against the alley wall and drops to his knees in front of him. “Shut up,” he says. “Shut the fuck up, Grantaire. Just let me.”

“What the—?” Grantaire looks down at Enjolras, who is undoing the buttons of Grantaire’s jeans, and shakes his head. “Damn it. This is just, not. Fuck you. Not fucking real.”

Enjolras assumes that’s a step in the right direction. Grantaire, unreality. With Grantaire, he transcends real on the daily. He pulls out Grantaire’s cock, which is going hard as he touches it, and he opens his mouth.

Grantaire’s chest’s still heaving from the dust-up. He tilts his head back against the bricks so he can’t see Enjolras eyeing him, can’t see his cock disappear in Enjolras’s mouth—a sight at which he usually marvels.

"It's just fucking unreal, you know?” At Grantaire’s sides, his hands, one mangled, grip at the irregular bricks of the wall. “I mean, you and me, and I know it's not fucking related, of course, I _know_ , but like. Everything's wrong.” His injured hand hits the wall—lightly, but Enjolras feels the shuddering reverberations of the pain in Grantaire’s dick and balls. “I was _done_. Before you. A nihilist. I didn’t give a shit. I moved out, I made friends, I fucked around, I did the day-to-day, I lived my life. And then one day the whole space-time continuum warped and _you_ were there, and you cared so fucking much I couldn’t not care. It’s all wrong. I shouldn’t be with you, I shouldn’t be with anyone. I should be alone and you should be in the vanguard of the revolution."

At this, Enjolras pulls off, just long enough to get Grantaire’s attention. “Unfair,” he says, then resumes lapping delicately at the tip, the salt this coaxes forth warm and reassuring on Enjolras’s tongue—enough to distract Grantaire, enough to drive him wild. 

"No, really,” Grantaire groans, wrapping a thick hand around Enjolras’s neck and dragging him deeper—fast and deep, again and again. He speaks in strangled bursts. “You shouldn't be with me. Because everything's fucked up. And that's the only reason you're with me. And maybe if things weren't so fucked up. You wouldn't be with me. So maybe if I'm not with you. Then things will stop being fucked up."

Enjolras’s response is to wrap a hand around Grantaire’s cock so that Grantaire’s fucking his hand _and_ his mouth, every stroke a decisive double-blow against breaking up for dumb reasons.

“This is it,” Grantaire says. “You keep saying _hope_. So, fuck, I can look at the facts, and I can pretend. And if I can let myself believe it’s gonna happen in our godforsaken lifetimes, it’s gotta happen _now_. This is the pivot point, the establishment is collapsing, it’s the make-or-fucking-break. They’re letting their guard down, and you need to get up in there, and I’m just in the fucking way...”

Sometimes you think a blowjob will do the talking for itself. But this shit Grantaire’s saying? This preposterous idea that he stands between Enjolras and his fate? The fate of the fucking _nation_? This is where Enjolras draws the line.

“You don’t get to choose for me,” he says, and Grantaire’s trying not to look at him—that much is clear from the angle of his brows, the tight lines of his face, but he’s looking, and when Enjolras sucks him back into his mouth, watching Grantaire’s hooded eyes the whole time, Grantaire can’t stifle the gasp. 

There’s no god, he thinks, feeling Grantaire stiffen and swell in his mouth. For Grantaire, he realizes, defiantly as he rejects religion, this is inexpressibly sad—so sad that he seeks out superstition, tries to barter with fate, as if that can fill the same role. As if by saying the right words, or drinking the right wine, or ditching the wrong boyfriend he could rescue humanity from this plague of caring.

This is obviously terrible logic, but Enjolras understands it. He never used to see himself as superstitious—not until Grantaire came along and Enjolras didn’t know how to proceed, how to make room in his life for someone, and Courf cornered him with the argument that Enjolras refused to date because he thought it would throw his focus, his dedication, and wasn't that about the biggest superstition of all? 

The argument worked. But that wasn’t really superstition. It was a reasonable concern. It's just that Enjolras was wrong. Having someone else makes his politics personal again, in a way they haven’t been for years.

Every speech he writes now is shot through with Grantaire. 

His hands clench Grantaire’s ass hard—painfully hard, because he knows he wants to feel it—and Grantaire grips him by his wayward hair and fucks into Enjolras, fast as if determined to let himself have this, _just this_ , and comes with a groan so plaintive it makes Enjolras ache and pull him in, pull from him every drop. 

He feels something different in Grantaire—a readiness to flee. Enjolras scares him. Maybe not Enjolras. Maybe _being_ with Enjolras. Maybe—oh, fuck, he fucking said it. _“You cared so much I couldn’t not care.”_

He gives it a moment, lets Grantaire begin to droop in his mouth, the smooth head retreating over the surface of his tongue, before he pulls away. 

Enjolras stands up. Grantaire’s hands have balled again into fists. He has to catch Grantaire before this moment’s gone. 

He puts his hands on the sides of Grantaire’s face. God, he loves the roughness there, stubble over pronounced jaw. Grantaire’s eyes are closed. The shadows obscure most of his face—only the long curve of his nose and the jut of his chin are clearly illuminated. His eyes do not shimmer, though; Enjolras assumes they are closed.

"There's no god,” Grantaire mutters. Enjolras can’t tell if it’s an exultation or a curse.

"No." He slides a hand into Grantaire's curls. "There's just this.”

Grantaire stiffens under his hands. Enjolras can feel Grantaire’s body trying, with a fickle dissolute resolution, to reject him. He knows why; he still hears Grantaire’s drunken negotiations with the universe, his happiness for a better world; it shouldn't feel so shitty. Still, even if it's for the greater good, rejection is the worst. 

He wants to yell at Grantaire for not being selfish enough to let this back-alley blowjob be a compelling closing argument on its own.

"But that doesn’t mean nothing matters," he says now. "I'm not a bargaining chip. You can't trade me for world peace. It's not your fault and your suffering won't make anything better.”

Grantaire’s hand twitches. Enjolras knows where this is going, and he catches it, but not in time. Instead, his hand is carried along, the two crashing together into the bricks.

Holy fuck, that hurts. Jesus, the pain. The pain that’s worse than this pain; the pain you seek this pain to mask. Is it selfishness? Is that it? Does Grantaire feel, in his heart of hearts, that he is not only undeserving and obstructive, but _selfish_ in his desire for comfort and happiness? Because he’s not in this alone.

"Stop that,” Enjolras snaps. “This isn’t just _about_ you. You suffering makes me feel like shit.”

There’s a glint of light, like Grantaire’s eye’s squinting open to see him.

"You think I fucking care?" 

"Yeah," Enjolras says, and leans in so that his narrow lips brush the fullness of Grantaire’s. "Because you do." He thinks back to the supply closet in December, the two of them crowded together, getting through too much in too little space, by being in it together. “I need you. I don’t care if it’s hard. Anything I do, it’s going to be because you believe I can.”

Grantaire throws his face back then to the night sky, which is cloudy and starless, and his features contort, and Enjolras enfolds him in his arms—faces pressed together, cheek to jaw, both inclined upwards to that uncertain night—and lets him cry.

* * * 

Enjolras glances over when he hears the bell chime in the ring. Grantaire knocks his gloves against some other guy's. 

"Good to see R back in there," Enjolras’s boxing instructor says at his shoulder. 

Of course she knows Grantaire. Seems like everyone here does. "Dunno when he started keeping a regular match. Used to be he'd just stop in when he needed to hit something." She smirks a little. "I had to boot him once. Gave him a bloody nose before I figured out he was too drunk to defend himself. Last couple months though, he's been in a lot more. It's like he's got some kind of schedule." She elbows Enjolras sharply in the ribs. "Know anything about that?"

He shrugs, tugging off his gloves. The trainer knocks Enjolras on the shoulder once. "See you next week."

By the time he makes it across to the ring, unwinding his hand-wraps as he goes, Grantaire and the other dude are going at it, not in an intemperate passion of flying fists, but shrewdly, with calculating eyes and hard-lined arms, dancing around each other, throwing quick jabs to keep each other on their toes, watchful and ready, waiting for the opening.

**Author's Note:**

> The timeline’s a little screwy in this one. It’s meant to end right before the Senate’s February State Work recess. There are so many atrocities I wanted to include here; most didn’t make it in. But know that the Amis are feeling them and thinking about them and resisting them, just like the rest of us.  
> *  
> While being an asshole naysayer, R alludes to the books _A Game of Thrones_ and _The Silver Chair_ , the newly-prominent slogan of the [Washington Post](http://www.washingtonpost.com), and Mirah’s song [“Monument.”](https://youtu.be/CTbQg-9tjNM)


End file.
